The course coordinator is John Cook,
University of Queensland Global Change Institute climate communication
fellow, and founder of the climate science myth debunking website Skeptical Science. Cook’s research has primarily focused on the psychology of climate science denial. As he explains,

97% of climate scientists agree that humans are causing global
warming; however, less than half of Australians are aware of humanity’s
role in climate change, while half of the US Senate has voted that
humans aren’t causing global warming. This free course explains why
there is such a huge gap between the scientific community and the
public. Our course looks at what’s driving climate science denial and
the most common myths about climate change.

The course includes climate science and myth debunking lectures by
the international team of volunteer scientific contributors to Skeptical
Science, including myself, and interviews with many of the world’s
leading climate science and psychology experts. Making Sense of Climate
Science Denial is a seven-week program featuring interviews with 75
scientific experts, including Sir David Attenborough, Katharine Hayhoe, Richard Alley, Michael Mann, and Naomi Oreskes.

The course incorporates lessons in both climate science and
psychology to explain the most common climate myths and to detail how to
respond to them. Research has shown that myth debunking is most
effective when people understand why the myth originated in the first
place. For example, cherry picking (focusing on a small bit of
convenient data and ignoring the rest) is one of the most common
fallacies behind climate science myths.

The lectures in the University of Queensland MOOC not only explain
the science, but also the fallacies underpinning each myth. This is a
unique and important feature to this course, because understanding their
origins effectively acts to inoculate people against myths.

The course coordinator is John Cook, University of Queensland Global Change Institute climate communication fellow, and founder of the climate science myth debunking website Skeptical Science. Cook’s research has primarily focused on the psychology of climate science denial. As he explains,
97% of climate scientists agree that humans are causing global warming; however, less than half of Australians are aware of humanity’s role in climate change, while half of the US Senate has voted that humans aren’t causing global warming. This free course explains why there is such a huge gap between the scientific community and the public. Our course looks at what’s driving climate science denial and the most common myths about climate change.
The course includes climate science and myth debunking lectures by the international team of volunteer scientific contributors to Skeptical Science, including myself, and interviews with many of the world’s leading climate science and psychology experts. Making Sense of Climate Science Denial is a seven-week program featuring interviews with 75 scientific experts, including Sir David Attenborough, Katharine Hayhoe, Richard Alley, Michael Mann, and Naomi Oreskes.
The course incorporates lessons in both climate science and psychology to explain the most common climate myths and to detail how to respond to them. Research has shown that myth debunking is most effective when people understand why the myth originated in the first place. For example, cherry picking (focusing on a small bit of convenient data and ignoring the rest) is one of the most common fallacies behind climate science myths.
The lectures in the University of Queensland MOOC not only explain the science, but also the fallacies underpinning each myth. This is a unique and important feature to this course, because understanding their origins effectively acts to inoculate people against myths.

Thousands of students from more than 130 countries have already enrolled
in Making Sense of Climate Science Denial. The goal is for the students
to come out of the course with a stronger understanding of climate
science, myth debunking, and the psychology of science denial that’s
become so pervasive and dangerous in today’s world.

I do heart New York. But I don’t heart the new climate logo and slogan from Milton Glaser, the creator of that iconic NY logo.

Certainly the climate movement needs some rebranding. So we’re
looking for a few good climate slogans in order to reach out and touch
someone. Carbon is forever, after all, but our attention span ain’t. And
only you can prevent warming-driven wildfires, well, you and the
political leadership of the major polluting nations.

Where to start? First, the Earth IS warming!!! From a basic messaging
perspective, nothing is worse than reinforcing the denier’s
nonsensically anti-scientific “we’re not warming” frame by constantly
repeating the line “it’s not warming.” Let’s hope the disastrous hashtag
#itsnotwarming dies a peaceful death in its sleep.

Second, making the Earth the centerpiece of any climate campaign is
just a not-good idea. I’ve been saying this for many years — see my 2008
Salon piece, “Let’s dump “Earth Day”: Affection for our planet is misdirected and unrequited. We need to focus on saving ourselves.”

What matters to most people is what happens to human beings —
generally human beings they know. The environmental movement’s major
messaging blunder in the past two decades has been failure to make clear
that preserving clean air and clean water and a livable climate is
about saving people, not something abstract (to most people) such as
saving the environment or the planet.

Third, relatedly, the Earth is NOT dying. The stable climate that
made modern civilization possible is dying and as a result people are
dying — and it’s going to get unimaginably worse if we don’t act ASAP.
None of that is captured in this passive and pessimistic slogan.

I wrote back in my 2008 piece, “I don’t worry about the earth. I’m
pretty certain the earth will survive the worst we can do to it.”
Climate activists “care about stopping global warming because of its
impact on humans.”

Many others have said the same thing. Grist notes in its critique of Glaser:
“Arguing that the earth is dying is serious error and will probably do
more harm than good” because it keeps things focused on the abstract and
off the real victim — people. They quote Neil deGrasse Tyson on climate change: “Earth will survive this … Earth will be here long after we render ourselves extinct.”

This new campaign further claims that “It’s Not Warming. It’s Dying” is “The most important fact on Earth.” Or, rather, “THE MOST IMPORTANT FACT ON EARTH.” Not.

The most important facts are, as climate communications pollster and researcher Anthony Leiserowitz of Yale put it recently,
“it’s real; it’s us; it’s bad; scientists agree it’s happening; and
there’s hope.” I might suggest, “it’s bad for people” and “there’s hope
if we act quickly” — but the point is “It’s Not Warming. It’s Dying”
misses all those key points and in fact even reinforces the notion that
it isn’t happening and/or that it’s too late to do anything about it. It
omits the fact that we’re the cause and hence we’re the solution.
Indeed, it exudes fatalism, since it implies the Earth has an incurable
disease and is near the end of its life.

Fourth, the logo itself reinforces the fatalism. The blackness has
replaced the greenness over almost all of the earth (except, strangely
enough, Antarctica). So it would appear to be a visual representation of
a planet in the later stages of dying.

Slogans can be a very worthwhile idea for branding (as I discuss in my book) — but that assumes you know what your brand is and that it is a marketable one.

Here, rather than the upbeat and attractive “I heart New York”
slogan/logo, we have a downbeat slogan and not terribly attractive logo.
Back to the drawing board, literally.

For those who want some ideas for better logos, a good starting point
would be the dozens proposed by Climate Progress a few years ago (see here and here).

How would a historian in 2393 write about this century if we continue
self-destructively ignoring climate science — and as a result modern
civilization as we know it had collapsed 300 years earlier?

That’s the question answered by Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway in
their excellent and unique new entry in the emerging Climate-Fiction
genre, “The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View From The Future.”

This is not CliFi like the nihilistic movie “Snowpiercer” or the book version of “The Hunger Games,” with their epic fights to the death and absorbing human drama.

Even so, Oreskes and Conway don’t spare the apocalypse: “The human
populations of Australia and Africa, of course, were wiped out.” But
they aren’t trying to portray the impact of the climate apocalypse on
individuals.

Part history, part science fiction, the book grapples with what I
expect will be the greatest puzzle to the countless future generations
who will suffer terribly — and needlessly — for our greed and myopia:

To the historian studying this tragic period of human history, the most astounding fact is that the victims knew what was happening and why. Indeed, they chronicled it in detail precisely because they
knew that fossil fuel combustion was to blame. Historical analysis also
shows that Western civilization had the technological know-how and
capability to effect an orderly transition to renewable energy, yet the
available technologies were not implemented in time.

So why didn’t knowledge lead to action — or, rather, to the
relatively low-cost actions that could have averted centuries of misery?
The authors offer several reasons. They blame a rigid adherence to
“free-market fundamentalism” — the notion that the market will solve all
problems and that government can’t play a positive role. They blame
scientists for being too reticent to spell out the dangers clearly.

And, you won’t be surprised that the authors of the now-classic book
“Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on
Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming” also blame the group they
label the “carbon combustion complex”:

A key attribute of the period was that power did not
reside in the hands of those who understood the climate system, but
rather in political, economic, and social institutions that had a strong
interest in maintaining the use of fossil fuels. Historians have
labeled this system the carbon combustion complex: a network of powerful
industries comprised of primary fossil fuel producers; secondary
industries that served fossil fuel companies (drilling and oil field
service companies, large construction firms, and manufacturers of
plastics and other petrochemicals); tertiary industries whose products
relied on inexpensive fossil fuels (especially automobiles and
aviation); and financial institutions that serviced their capital
demands. Maintaining the carbon-combustion complex was clearly in the
self-interest of these groups, so they cloaked this fact behind a
network of “think tanks” that issued challenges to scientific knowledge
they found threatening.

One of the central ironies of the book is that the freedoms enjoyed
in modern Western civilization are destroyed by our failure to prevent
catastrophic climate change, a failure caused in large part by those
neoliberals, conservatives, and libertarians who placed personal freedom
(and hence anti-government laissez-faire capitalism) above all other
values. Climate Progress has been discussing this tragic irony for manyyears.

In the future Oreskes and Conway lay out, climate change leads to
widespread drought, food shortages, rapid sea level rise, riots, civil
strife, a migration of more than a billion people and widespread use of
martial law — all things that require a strong-centralized government.
They write:

The ultimate paradox was that neoliberalism, meant to
ensure individual freedom above all, led eventually to a situation that
necessitated large-scale government intervention.

As an aside, that is an “irony” and not really a “paradox.” There are
a handful of such miscues in the book. For instance, the book ends with
a “Lexicon of Archaic Terms,” which cleverly includes “capitalism” and
“cryosphere,” but, puzzlingly, also includes “greenhouse gases,” which
is a term I would expect to become far more commonly understood in a
super-warm future.

But overall the book is well done. My biggest complaint is that it is
too short, a little over 50 pages in the main text. Since it is derived
from a Winter 2013 paper in Daedelus, it could have been fleshed out more.

For instance, the authors write:

… In 2023, the infamous “year of perpetual summer” lived
up to its name, taking 500,000 lives worldwide and costing nearly $500
billion in losses due to fires, crop failure, and the deaths of
livestock and companion animals.

The loss of pet cats and dogs garnered particular attention among
wealthy Westerners, but what was anomalous in 2023 soon became the new
normal.

Why exactly did so many pet cats and dogs of wealthy Westerners die
in 2023? The authors don’t say, but the implication seems to be that
there wasn’t food for them. But if so, that really needed to be spelled
out since it isn’t obvious that would happen in real life. At least in
this country, we have such an abundance of food — and we waste nearly
half of it (and burn 40% of the corn crop in our engines) — so I’m
inclined to think that people would make fairly simple changes to their
diet and to the food/ethanol production system rather than let a
substantial number of pets die, at least through this kind of one-year
event.

But this is really a quibble — the book is so thought-provoking, I’d
like to see more of it. Indeed, the issue of if and when most Westerners
might abandon pets as we destroy the planet’s ability to feed the human
population is just the kind of thing science fiction should make us
think about.

We already feed much of the world unsustainably — using (up) ground
water for irrigation in large parts of the world, for instance. We are
in the process of Dust-Bowlifying (or inundating) some of the world’s
richest agricultural land, as the authors discuss. So if continue on our
current path of unrestricted greenhouse gas emissions then post-2050 we
will have a population of 9 billion or more and a planetary carrying
capacity far below even current levels. Would we really maintain 180 million (!) cats and dogs
in this country alone under such circumstances? For that matter, would
we still convert a large fraction of our crops into fuel for our cars,
and would we maintain the same kind of meat-based diet even though that
can require 10 times as much acreage and water as a vegetarian (or
insect) based diet?

The only thing that is certain about the future is death and taxes
and multiple, catastrophic impacts on humanity if we continue on our
current greenhouse gas emissions path. How humanity might deal with all
those terrible impacts hitting at once is something we all need to think
about.

What is science fiction today will someday be the history of real,
live people — billions of them. Kudos to Oreskes and Conway for finding a
creative way to talk about the immoral choice we are making today and
how those billions of people will suffer for it.

A Guide for Scientists,
Journalists, Educators,
Political Aides, and the Interested Public

Welcome to the online home of the CRED Guide: The Psychology of Climate Change Communication,
published by the Center for Research on Environmental Decisions at
Columbia University. The guide is available in its entirety on this
site,